What It's All About

Welcome to the Motorcycle Registry Website. This is the first blog post on the site and I thought for the first blog post, I may as well explain the reason I decided to build the site.

I've had the idea for this website for about a year or maybe more now. The idea is just to have a place where motorbike owners can put their personal stamp on the internet. I thought it would be cool to be able to look up a model of bike and see how many are still around, what shape they're in and where around the world they are.

With this idea bouncing around in my head for the past while, I finally decided to pull the trigger and start building this site when I saw another site with an owner's listing page that hadn't been updated in half a dozen years. My thoughts were, of course it isn't getting updated. Unless someone is motivated to list the info, it won't get done and it's much easier to list the info if your the guy (or gal) who owns the bike, so why not just give the owners the tools to put up the info.

So, that's the reason this exists but now that it's up and running and a few people have posted their bikes, I've got to get busy and make it better. Here are a few ideas I've had to make it more cool, useful, interesting, etc...

• Give members their own blog to write about their bikes, experiences, build logs, trips, races, etc...
  Adding blogs for members isn't a big stretch so if I get some interest, I'll add that asap.
   
• Give members a shop where they can advertise and sell spares to other members on the site.
  Setting up personal shops so that you can sell, trade or barter parts is a bit tricky because of the complexity of making sure that each item listed relates to your shop/account. I've given this a fair bit of thought so I do have some ideas about how to approach it but it will definitely be a long term goal and only if there's a lot of interest. More on that later if I get enough interest in the idea.   
   
• Build a rating system so that you can give a bike you like the "thumbs-up".
  Again, not too tricky so if I get feedback thinking that this is a good idea, I'll get moving on that.
   
• Add some sort of messaging system so that like minded members can send/receive messages. 
  This can be achieved in a number of ways. If there's interest, I'll roll it out and we can test a few methods. I want to avoid bothering people with it so it will likely live on the site and if someone contacts you. you'll get an email notification mentioning that someone has messaged you and you can retrieve the message by clicking a link in the email. This will take a bit of doing but if it's useful, I think it should be added.

Other ideas:
I've got some feedback from a few of you who want to expand the listings to include other make/model bikes and I think that's a great idea. I fully intend to allow other bikes but I think I'll open that door slowly. I want to make sure that it's still easy to find the bikes your looking for without being overwhelmed with options and visual junk.

On the subject of visual clutter, I will be putting some effort into the design of the site in the near future. At the moment I'm just using a commonly available design theme to hold everything in place while I deal with the mechanics of the site. Now that it is pretty much up to speed in that regard, I'll be embarking on a project to make it look good too.

Anyway, this project is really open ended and I'm not entirely sure how it's going to evolve so hopefully I can get some feedback and direction on what would be useful, cool or interesting to have here.

Take it easy,
Andrew Wasson | MC Registry

PS: Comments are being moderated so that it doesn't become a haven for Louis Vuton hand bag spammers but if you have something to say or have ideas, they will get posted for sure and hopefully we can make them happen. If you're logged in you can comment without dealing with the CAPTCHA image thing. That's just to combat spammers.